


Re-

by Bespectacled_Panda



Category: PBG Hardcore series
Genre: Gen, I like how that's an existing tag, MC HC 7, Not much to say about this one honestly, Timeline Shenanigans, kinda Kimi no Na wa-ish actually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:35:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21556357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bespectacled_Panda/pseuds/Bespectacled_Panda
Summary: “Do you ever feel like…we’ve done this before?”---Or, Austin and Jeff visit the graves.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	Re-

**Author's Note:**

> The usual warnings apply here: This is fiction, no disrespect is intended towards anyone depicted herein, and please don’t interpret this as a comment on reality. If you have ever been affiliated with Hardcore in any way, please X out of this tab. To be honest, this is not one of the most awkward things I’ve ever written, but still.
> 
> And if your name starts with E- and ends with -mma, you shouldn’t be reading this either >:\
> 
> Like it says in the tags, this is gen, but also some teensy, tiny, mostly implied bits of ryzab & spacebutter snuck in, because this is how I am. 
> 
> (Also there’s a one-line mention of Jared in here. It was unavoidable, sorry.)

The wind is cold.

It whistles across the frozen plain, kicking up the loose snow into an almost-fog. It was blizzarding earlier, but the storm has fortunately abated by now. The only remnants of it are the severe, gray clouds hanging low in the sky above and the snowscape stretching off as far as the eye can see, undisturbed aside from two wobbling sets of footprints.

Austin hunches his shoulders, burrowing even deeper into his coat. The cold air stings his exposed skin like tiny needles, and he lowers his chin, feeling the wind prick at his eyes until they flood over with tears.

The graves, too, are cold.

They’re stark. Standing alone, solitary, planted on a small platform embedded in the side of the hill. Their tops are blanketed with a thin layer of snow. Austin and the others used to come out to clean them off every so often, but as the others slipped away one by one, so too did the strength and enthusiasm of those still remaining. Slowly, scrubbing a gloved fist at his watery eyes, Austin tilts his head to look up at the cobblestone crosses.

Five.

Five warriors lost. Five lives stolen, snatched away in the cruelest and most abrupt of ways. And now, all that remains is two.

It still hurts so much.

Austin wraps his arms around himself, and a violent shudder runs through him. Beside him, he senses Jeff turning to look at him.

“…Hey. You alright?” Jeff’s voice comes after a moment, soft with concern.

“Yeah.”

He isn’t, but at the same time, he is. He’s no worse off than he usually is, really. It’s just that he’d forgotten how viscerally his heart would seize when he climbed the stairs— _Luke’s stairs_ —up the mountainside and laid eyes on the graves again.

He hasn’t been here since—since Ray went. And somewhere deep down, he knows he’s been avoiding it on purpose. He doesn’t like to think about that, because it makes him feel like a horrible, horrible person. But now that he’s here again, he’s reminded exactly why he stayed away. All he can think about is that his friends are there. In the earth. Their bodies. Or—what could be recovered of their bodies, that is.

Austin feels himself starting to tremble, not in another shudder, but in that tight-chested sort of way he knows won’t stop until he goes back inside and busies himself in something distracting for at least a couple of hours.

“It’s cold,” he says, apropos of nothing, and Jeff hums softly in agreement.

Neither of them speaks for a few minutes more. Without their voices, everything is still and silent, save for the dissonant _woosh_ ing of the wind. Austin turns slightly, letting his eyes trail over the snowdrifts, looking like the sands of Egypt dyed bone-white. There’s just so much emptiness, so much lifelessness. There’re no cows or sheep. No strays or creepers or spiders. And certainly no other people. No upbeat voices or loud laughter bursting through the quiet, no cheery smiles or bright eyes. No one at all.

It’s just him and Jeff by themselves. Just him and Jeff and the five graves of their friends. It gives Austin a sense of gut-wrenching loneliness like a black hole in the pit of his chest, denting him in on himself like a crushed can of soda. And for an instant, he feels like all of him is being pulled apart by the force of it.

He can still see it when he closes his eyes. The zombies pouring out of the cave and into the house, their fingers rotten and faces stained with blood. The endermen, violet-irised, long-limbed, stretched out like twisted shadows come to life. And the lava. The lava. The hole into lava they didn’t see. And the sound of Ray screaming, screaming, screaming as he was _burned alive_ —

—No. No.

Austin cups his hands over his face, staring hard at his boots in the snow, his breath quickening.

No. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.

Jeff shifts slightly, letting out a faint sigh that pulls Austin from his thoughts. They’re standing close enough that Austin can just barely feel the heat of Jeff’s body on his arm. He longs to let his head tip sideways onto Jeff’s shoulder, to let himself fall into the crook of the arm that Jeff will surely wrap around his waist. But he doesn’t. He’s not sure whether it’s because he’s physically rooted, frozen in place, or if it’s because for once in his fucking life he doesn’t want to be weak and needy. But either way, he doesn’t move. He just stays there, gazing up at the stone crosses. The five crosses marking the deaths of his five friends.

And then, abruptly, something twists in the back of his mind.

A spark, a flicker. Like the tiniest torch being lit within the folds of his brain. A single droplet of water striking a still pond, sending ripples rolling outwards in concentric circles.

“Hey, Jeff?” he begins quietly, not really thinking about it. His lips have gone slightly numb, making the words feel foreign in his mouth.

“Yeah?” Jeff answers.

“Do you ever feel like...”

“Like what?”

His brow furrows. “I—nah, forget it. It’s dumb.”

“No, dude, now I wanna know.” Jeff’s voice lifts, and when Austin looks over at him, he cracks a slight, teasing smile. “What were you gonna say?”

Truthfully, Austin himself isn’t quite sure what exactly he was going to say. He’s still trying to piece it together, this strange feeling that’s rattling around inside of him. He doesn’t have any clue what it is or why it struck him so suddenly. But something about it almost seems…important. Like he’s just now starting to remember something he’d forgotten for the longest time.

“…You really wanna know?”

“Yeah!” Jeff leans forward eagerly. “Tell me!”

The feeling has morphed into a slight burning sensation now. It’s insistent, wrapping itself tighter and tighter around Austin’s train of thought until it’s completely derailed. “...Okay. It’s just—” Austin starts eventually, and he makes a vague noise in the back of his throat, drawing a line in the snow with the toe of his boot.

“Yeah?” Jeff prompts.

“D’you ever feel like…like…”

Austin’s heart lurches, stumbles into a rapid _pit-a-pat_. His breathing shallows again, and all at once, his nerves start to vibrate under his skin.

“Like…” he tries again, but his tongue is dry.

Like…like what? It’s there. It’s definitely there; he can feel it. But it’s still just _barely_ out of his reach. Just a fingertip’s length away. Something significant, something vital. Something he inexplicably, desperately needs to figure out right this very instant.

“Do you ever f-feel…”

And then, Austin goes still. His blood, his muscles, his neurons—all of it grinds to a halt, freezing like the blank snowscape around him. Slowly, he lifts his head to meet Jeff’s eyes.

“…Like we’ve done this before?”

_he's facing away, his hands clasped regally behind his back._

_the hem of his cloak sways gently to and fro, to and fro, as he hovers there in place, a statue suspended in midair. he’s still, serene, nearly unmoving save for the slight rise and fall of his shoulders._

_“...i can let you leave.”_

_these are the first words he has spoken in quite some time. they are quiet, plain, matter-of-fact. nothing about their tone betrays the depth of their meaning. after a moment, he draws in a long, heavy breath and lets it wisp out of him again._

_“but there will be consequences. side effects, if you will.”_

_he pauses once more, waiting. allowing the gravity of this to sink in. but when he is answered by nothing, he continues on again:_

_“no one will remember you once you are gone. you will be completely erased from their memories. history will be rewritten to exclude you.” his linked hands finally fall apart from each other, but the rest of him never strays from his measured deliberation. “it will be as if you never even—”_

_“i don’t care.”_

_and there comes the other voice. the second voice, bursting forth hot and searing like the stabbing of a blade. slowly, the man turns, rotates on an invisible axis to look upon the one who is there with him. a hint of surprise scrawls itself on his shadowy features when he sees the other now standing fully upright, as stiff and sharp as a broken pane of glass._

_“i’m completely done with this place,” the other spits. he's jerking forward, eyes flashing, teeth bared. and the man draws back slightly, startled. “i hate it here so much. i’d do_ anything _to leave.”_

Austin crumples, his hands flying to his face. A bolt of lightning shatters through his skull, and he gasps in a mouthful of frozen air.

“Oh my god. Oh—oh my god.”

Jeff leans forward urgently, his eyebrows knitting. “Austin? What’s wrong?”

“ _Jeff_ ,” Austin chokes. His mind is spinning, whirling. Splitting in half. Everything is hitting him all at once. The world feels like it’s shifted, warped beneath him. He’s falling, falling, falling. Hurtling towards the ground in an endless loop.

“Austin, are you…?” Jeff starts cautiously, but Austin barely hears him.

Déjà vu. That’s what this is.

That’s what he’s feeling. The most sick, rotten sense of déjà vu has swallowed him whole, clawing at his insides and shredding his organs to a bloody pulp.

His heart is slamming against his chest, and he sways, almost on the verge of passing out. Everything around him feels wrong. So, so wrong. Like he’s been in a dream all this time and only now has he finally woken up.

Because—this is home.

And yet, it’s not.

He’s been here before. Not here, but _here_. He—he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand. But the truth of it reverberates in his chest, dissonant and resounding like the strike of metal on metal.

Everywhere he looks, his head whipping around with desperate, jerky motions, he almost sees the scenery in duplicate, slightly offset so nothing lines up at all. He feels like half of him has been wrenched through a wormhole and spat out somewhere else, his eyes feeding him back two vastly different pictures that his brain is warping in on itself trying to decipher.

Where—

Where is this? Where is he?

Where has he been all this time?

The more he stares out at the scenery, blankly unseeing, not even processing Jeff’s voice calling out his name, the more twisted everything feels. Truth and falsity clash in his mind in a burst of sparks that sears the underside of his skin like lava. He’s looking through a spyglass that’s curved back in on itself. He’s gazing through a mirror into the backside of his eyes.

This can’t be right. This can’t—there’s no way—

It closes in on him. The wind, the snow, the crystalizing air. The graves, the land, their home. The journey. Everything. Everyone.

Everyone.

Suddenly, his chest constricts sharply, and his fingers dig into his hair. “Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.”

The realization hits him like a wave, amorphous and all-devouring. Something—something slipped his mind. Something big. Something powerful enough to rock the earth. Something that he’s only just started to piece together again from the jagged fragments of his memories.

“Austin?” comes Jeff’s voice again, more urgent now.

“We— _we forgot someone_ ,” Austin splutters out, and Jeff’s forehead wrinkles.

“What are you—”

Austin grabs at Jeff’s coat. His eyes are rent wide, his pupils grown to twice their size, and he’s breathing so fast and hard his vision is going fuzzy. How could he forget? How _could_ he? And yet, even know, he still can’t fully remember.

But he knows it. He knows it. He knows it deep in his bones.

“There was someone else. _There was someone else._ ”

_“…are you absolutely sure about this?”_

_he says it quietly, almost tightly, looking down at the other one standing there on the ground beneath him. the other’s face is dark, his eyes flaring thunder and lightning swirled together into a tornado. his brow is lowered, and he stares up silently in hard, unflinching eye contact._

_“i do not think you understand the true gravity of your decision,” the man goes on. “you would quite literally be leaving everyone behind. your friends. your brother. the man that you love. the man who loves you back just the same.”_

_the other’s chest swells with a sharp breath. “i told you,” he growls, low, “i don’t care. dea—he’ll be fine without me. they'll_ all _be fine without me. i just want to leave.” his chin lowers slightly, his eyes narrowing and sliding away. “please, i—i’m begging you, just let me leave.”_

_and, on the last sentence, his voice breaks. cracks. shatters away to reveal what he’s been so fiercely concealing all along behind his harsh words and cold demeanor: a heart that has been broken so many times that it can’t muster the strength to go on any longer._

_he really has been through a lot, hasn’t he? it's quite a shame. he was always one of their best and brightest. so knowledgeable and patient and guiding. he was such fun to watch through it all._

_but after all this time, he’s been worn down. like strong winds weathering away a rock face until the whole thing crumbles into the sea. considering everything that has happened to him, it is no wonder he’s grown weary of it all._

_it is truly no wonder._

_a few more moments of pause slip by before the man finally speaks again: “so, you accept the consequences?” he says, but it is only a mere formality at this point, and both of them know it._

_“yes.”_

_the other gives a single nod. a nod that expresses a thousand different things all at once. but what mostly lies there in his face is pure resignation and exhaustion. the man does not doubt for a single instant that he is telling the truth: he has reached acceptance, and he is fully prepared for whatever is to follow._

_“very well.”_

_the man closes his eyes, just for a brief flicker of a second. and slowly, he extends his hand._

_“then it will be done.”_

“What do you mean, _there was someone else?_ ” Jeff repeats, his face tautening with worry. His hands come up to settle on Austin’s shoulders in a way that’s probably supposed to be comforting, but Austin barely feels it, barely senses Jeff’s presence at all.

_Someone else. Someone else. Someone else._

It blares in his mind on loop. His mouth opens and shuts, his throat choking around the words that just won’t come. He has no idea how to verbalize the magnitude of what he’s experiencing. There’s a pit in his torso. His lungs have been popped like bubbles.

 _There was someone else_.

They—they forgot about someone. They forgot about everything. Someone is missing, and they didn’t even notice. Like a fog that swept around them, obscuring their vision so completely. Like reality itself was wallpapered over with pretty flowers, and only now is that false top layer finally starting to peel up again.

And Austin can sense, deep within him, that there’s a gap, an empty space there where this missing person is supposed to be. Where they _used to be_. But no matter how hard he wracks his brain, he can’t pinpoint it. No matter where he looks, everything stares hollowly back at him in the same, stomach-churning mixture of familiarity and surreality.

All he knows is that there was _someone_.

Someone was here, and now they’re not. As if they vanished right into thin air.

“Wait, Jeff,” he bursts out all at once, his voice raw like gravel, “just let me—think this through with me.” His eyes swivel up. “Who—who was here with us this time?”

Jeff blinks back at him, visibly shaken. “I—”

Austin holds out both of his hands. “Okay,” he says, trying to get his bearings. “O-okay. Okay. Just—I need to work through this.” He clears his throat roughly. “S-so, there’s me and you.” Slowly, he extends his index and middle fingers. “Dean and Ray.” Ring and pinkie. “Barry and Jared.” Thumb and other index. “And...”

And he falters. His voice dries up in his mouth. He tries to swallow, but he can’t.

There were seven people.

The two of them. And the five graves standing before them.

But—

Austin is staring at his hands, but he isn’t truly looking at them. His gaze has turned itself inwards, as if his eyeballs have rolled all the way back to point into his skull. There’s a gaping hole in his mind, in his memories. And he’s one step from falling headlong into the abyss.

In an instant, his senses cloud over with a rush of half-formed recollections. Dimly, he can perceive it. Like he’s submerged in the ocean, and it’s no more than a murky shadow circling around him. A face. A voice. A figure. A soul. So distant, so far away, and yet so woven into Austin’s very being that he feels his heart stop for a beat.

He sees orange. Orange and brown.

Brown hair, green eyes.

The faint sensation of a smile, of laughter.

A figure standing in the grass, framed against the winter—no, the _summer_ sky. A sword clutched in one hand, a shield in the other.

Mingling, blending, mixing with the others. An excruciatingly intimate camaraderie. A familiarity so nebulous and elusive that Austin can’t completely fathom it. But the very hint, the very whisper of it leaves him desolate with the knowledge that he no longer has it, his heart like a forest scorched to ash.

Jeff tending to the farm—the farm? What farm?—with someone else by his side. Dean bumping up against someone at the crafting table. His voice garbled in Austin’s head as he says, “You coming, ■■■■■■■?”

And the Nether. His partner when they split into separate groups. The one there with him when they felt Dean die in the lava.

Wait.

Dean didn’t die in the Nether. Nobody died in the Nether. They all made it out alive.

…Didn’t they?

Slowly, Austin’s eyes return to the graves, to the snow-blanketed earth beneath them. He’s shaking again as he stares forward, transfixed, pupils dilated.

“And—”

The seventh finger rises.

“A—and—”

_their hands meet. the man’s eyes flash blinding yellow._

**_“Goodbye, McJones.”_ **

Austin feels something inside of him snap and fall away.

“And...Luke,” he finishes, over-pronouncing each syllable.

The words feel utterly wrong on his lips, but he doesn’t know why. Luke was the seventh person. Of course it was Luke. He _knows_ it was Luke. He squints at the graves, suddenly feeling a little bit strange. Why—

Why exactly was he confused?

After a few seconds, he glances at Jeff out of the corner of his vision. Jeff is just goggling at him silently, his eyes round with bafflement.

“…What?” he says quietly. “Austin, I—sorry, but I honestly don’t get what you mean.”

Austin’s mouth dips into a frown. He rubs the back of his neck with a gloved hand, trying to conjure up what was just needling at him. But his fingers find only empty air, and he shakes his head a little bit roughly.

“I—I’m sorry. I guess I lost my train of thought.”

That’s odd. He doesn’t remember at all what he was just thinking. He’s usually scatterbrained, sure, but never to _this_ level. He has the strong sense that there was _something_ important that he’d just figured out, but whatever it was, it’s gone. Gone. Gone without even a trace.

“What...”

Austin lets out a long breath, the air turning smoky-white in front of him. The wind is cold, blowing through his hair and whistling across the tops of the graves.

“What was I saying again?”

**Author's Note:**

> Or, AU where McJones’s retirement was him voluntarily choosing to erase himself from the HC universe, and MC7 is a rewritten MC5 where he never existed.
> 
> I’ve had this idea rolling around in my head for a very long time. It started as an idea for a comic, but it was just a pipe dream because I knew I didn’t have the level of art talent required to create that. But then like a year later I realized that I could just write it as a story instead, and so here we are.
> 
> Honestly, this should just be taken as a confession that I’m still not over McJones’s retirement, even over a year and a half later. It’s just so sad to me, the conditions he left under. MC 6 & MineZ 2 both really, really sucked for him specifically, and by the end, it was just so clear that he wasn’t happy or having any fun with the show anymore. His resentment towards Hardcore after the fact broke my heart. (Although he seemed to mellow out after a few months of living the Retired Life, so that’s one positive, I guess.)
> 
> Anyway tfw you forget your own brother


End file.
